Heritage et AL

Written by Sue Bradford - John Stacpoole Scholar 2025 In February 1983 I was one of the organisers of a public meeting of over a hundred people at the Pitt St Methodist Church Hall in Auckland.  Called in the face of high and rising unemployment and the punitive treatment of beneficiaries, those present agreed to set up a new organisation, the Auckland Unemployed Workers Rights Centre (AUWRC).   Little did I know that I would spend much of the next 16 years of my life working with AUWRC, right up until the group’s decision to dissolve itself in July 1999.   Last year I was grateful to receive the Auckland Library Heritage Trust’s John Stacpoole scholarship.  This gave me the opportunity to sort and inventory a selection of AUWRC materials which I had managed to retrieve and store over the decades since our closure.  The completed archive will be accessioned by the Libraries’ Heritage Collections shortly.   The new archive presents a somewhat ...